


curtains

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Coulson's family issues, Curtain Fic, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Future Fic, LITERALLY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-05-17
Packaged: 2018-06-09 01:56:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6884332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daisy and Coulson discuss furniture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	curtains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nausicaa_of_phaeacia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nausicaa_of_phaeacia/gifts).



She pulls back, distractedly scratching Coulson’s bare knee, staring at the yellow brushstroke, her favorite so far.

They are kind of tired out from just a bit of trying out colors in the living room wall. Maybe they shouldn’t have attempted remodeling coming straight from spending the morning saving the world (and getting punched in the face for it, in Coulson’s case). They were a little too ambitious - or maybe they were a little too excited about starting work on the house.

So after trying out a couple of colors on the wall - cerulean blue, pale yellow, pale orange, Daisy really can’t seem to learn the complicated and random names of paint, even though they are written right there on the buckets - they decided to open a couple of beers and sit on the floor, contemplating their work and sweating it out.

It’s nice, even if the place doesn’t look quite great yet, because it’s feels like they haven’t taken a break from work in forever or at least six months. And it’s a sunny day, the first real day of summer, all golden or so it seems to them. They’re sentimental like that. 

“I think we should probably give all the furniture to charity,” she says, gesturing at the dinner table. Coulson smiles, because of course she didn’t say “ _throw away_ ”. She wouldn’t.

“You don’t like it.” 

“No, it’s fine,” she says. “But it’s - _spy furniture_.”

He takes a sip of his beer.

“I don’t think that’s a thing,” he tells her.

“It totally is. The point was to start from scratch,” she says. He didn’t know there was _a point_ \- other than the obvious point of having a place to be together and alone, now that SHIELD was settled and public and they didn’t need to hide away in the Playground all the time. The point was a place of their own where they could be alone. “We should furnish the whole thing ourselves. We’re a family now, right?”

He nods, quietly. They spent a lot of time being non-verbal about this at the beginning. Then Daisy decided it was healthy for her to get validation, and Coulson couldn’t blame her, after her childhood, and years of partners who weren’t exactly expressive or even particularly supportive. It works fine with him, and it appeals to his “essential corny nature” (that’s what Daisy named it, teasingly, one night, pressing his shoulders down on the mattress, not giving Coulson a chance to protest or defend himself) and gives him the perfect excuse to shower Daisy with declarations of affection, once he knew that’s something she wanted. They’re both shy people, even in intimacy (especially in intimacy, he suspects) so this spelling it out is difficult - but good.

“Yeah, I guess it’s bad enough it’s a safe house,” Coulson says, feeling guilty about that, having wanted to give her new things that had nothing to do with SHIELD.

It’s not what Daisy imagined, of course - but she stopped having those dreams (big house on the country, two story building, a backyard with a dog, a big family) when she was fourteen. But it’s better than she ever imagined, because it’s real and it’s Coulson, and it’s her and Coulson, and the details are for lonely children, not a woman (a superhero, excuse me) who has found her place in the world.

“ _Ex_ -safe house,” she points out.

In a way this is perfect. The thriftiness suits them. As a safe house the flat was unusable - already compromised. But it’s SHIELD’s property. And it’s in DC, close to headquarters.

“A spy house for spies,” she says, smiling.

“More like, for a spy and a superhero,” Coulson corrects her, resting his hand over her stomach, trying to get at the strip of skin exposed over the waistband of her old jeans, like a teenager.

Daisy leans back a bit and gets a taste of fading sunlight in her mouth, Coulson’s fingers make her smile, the reverential predictable touch. She gives him a look - he is vaguely ridiculous in an old t-shirt and shorts, his hair a mess from the sweat (yes, a robot hand is good for painting but a bad leg is still a bad leg), and vaguely ridiculous with that goofy grin of being in love. He doesn’t seem to care. That’s hot, she thinks. She’s kind of ridiculous as well.

“What about the curtains?” she asks, she’s excited, getting ahead of herself, she’s glad this is Coulson, because with anyone else she’d be afraid of looking too eager. That was always her fear since she was a kid - looking too invested and putting people off with her love. 

“What about the curtains?” Coulson repeats, looking distracted, curious hands on the hem of her jeans.

“I’m thinking, blue.”

“Blue? With the yellow wall?” he asks.

She pouts. “Excuse me, Mister I have such taste in color combination I spend ten minutes every morning picking my tie.”

He loops his arm around her back a moment, flashing a smile.

“That’s why I don’t like wearing ties anymore,” he says, leaning towards her. “I need those _ten extra minutes_.”

He drops his head to kiss her right where neck meets shoulder and her t-shirt ends. He likes the taut topography of that part, the extra muscles only SHIELD training would give you, he likes how strong and solid she feels there.

“I mean, yeah, okay, you’re the expert, probably,” Daisy says, arching her body to meet his lips. “My only experience in interior decorator was figuring out where in my van I could fit the camping stove.”

She’s not whining, she swears - some days (the days where it seems like the safety of the world depends on her powers, or the days when she fails those expectations) she almost misses the simplicity of the old squalor. She is not about to romanticize it - it was a hard life, in many ways harder than her life now, and lonely, so much she couldn’t see herself ever picking curtains with anyone like this - but it had its moments.

“What do you like? I’m counting on your and your good taste for this,” she tells Coulson.

“Mm uh.”

He makes a face. Definitely _a face_. She knows that face. He tries to hide it, but he’s not the greatest spy in the world when it comes to that stuff - it’s one of the first things she noticed about him, he had too expressive a face for a hardened spy.

Coulson knows that once Daisy has seen the face she’s not letting him go.

“What?” she asks, tilting her head.

He flattens his hands on the wooden floor. It’s slightly warm from the sunlight.

“I’m not sure what _I_ like. Not really.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

He shifts, visibly uncomfortable. Or visibly for him, anyway.

“I know what good taste was supposed to look like,” he says. “But that was just part of the job.”

“Part of the job?”

He drops his head, in a gesture she knows well, too. Part of Daisy likes that he doesn’t enjoy talking about himself, unlike every other dude she’s ever been with - and part is frustrated, because she wants to know everything.

“SHIELD was only ever _half_ a secret super spy organization,” he explains, the notion in the back of his head that he shouldn’t be complaining. “You still needed people to talk to the local authorities, victims, sometimes opposition.”

“That would be you.”

He nods. “It seems like I had a knack for it.”

“Yeah, you can pretend you’re not super weird pretty well.”

Coulson smiles. No one else ever calls him weird. Or dork, Daisy does that one as well. It’s like she sees this version of himself no one else does, and well if that sounds sappy then it’s because it’s supposed to sound sappy.

“So I had to learn about… many things. Including how to look like I had taste. It impresses people. SHIELD wanted me to be impressive.”

“You’re very impressive, I swear,” she teases him, sounding like she finds him anything but.

“Eventually that knowledge erased what was my real taste, what I liked. Do I like wearing suits or is just that the job made me? I keep asking myself that.”

“You don’t. You like jeans and worn out sweaters,” Daisy tells him.

Maybe he needs her to tell him what he likes. But that would just be another version of the same thing.

“What would you like to have in here?” he asks her.

Daisy narrows her eyes but her reply sounds like she has thought about this often - which, Coulson guesses, it’s pretty natural.

“I’ve always wanted one of those bookshelves - the Ikea ones?”

“ _Ikea_?”

It’s not like they have a ton of money for personal expenses, but he is sure they can do better than Ikea furniture.

“It’s stupid I know. But I saw them on the movies and - I liked the idea of getting those myself. And building the thing with someone. It looks fun, I want to try that.”

Meaning she really wants to try something like that with him.

They’re both a bit surprised they are doing this. They have been together some time but not long enough that this seems like something inevitable right now.

 

“Don’t change the subject,” she tells him, that authoritative voice Coulson likes because he likes when he just has to follow her lead. “We were talking about what you like.”

“I told you, I’m not sure.”

SHIELD beat it out me, he thinks. He doesn’t begrudge SHIELD for it, he let it happen. 

He feels Daisy stepping into a different mood. 

“Okay, let’s try to figure out what you really like,” she says, crawling behind him until Coulson is sitting between her legs. She squeezes his shoulders. “Close your eyes.” He does. “Think about a piece of furniture you love, picture it in your head.”

He makes a warm noise at the back of his throat, a sound that goes through Daisy in a moment, making her smile.

“My mom bought this ludicrous lamp once,” he says, his eyes still closed, leaning back against Daisy’s warm familiar body while he pictures his mother coming back home with that lamp. “It was after we had to move, after dad died. And when he was alive we were - not rich, but we did okay. New furniture, clean and good. But after it was just my mom and I we didn’t have much money. We had to furnish with with old stuff.”

Daisy wraps her arms around his chest, always happy to hear him talk about his childhood, and always sad too, like she wants to reach out and make those years happier for him, and maybe it’s a good thing he doesn’t talk about those days often. She can picture it, though - he has shown her a couple of photographs of the period (reluctantly, but Daisy felt it was important, a rite of passage) and she knows how his mother looked when he was twelve or so.

“What was the lamp like?” she asks, holding him against her chest.

He has to laugh a bit, just remembering.

“A piece of junk she picked up at some yard sale in our new neighborhood,” he says. “It was one of those huge lamps for the living room that looked like those driers they used to have at the hairdressers.”

“Oh god.”

“Yeah. Mom loved that thing.”

Daisy noses the back of his head.

“You loved it, too.”

He pauses before replying, taking a moment to wonder at the Daisy’s existence. It’s that time of the day for him, apparently.

“I did,” he admits. ”It was one of the first things we owned, when we moved to Boston. It was ugly but it was…”

“Yours,” Daisy finishes for him. “You and your mom’s.”

“I guess…”

He lets his whole body drop and turn to liquid between Daisy’s arms, for a moment, licking his wounds decades after the fact.

“That’s why I love my Hula girl,” she tells him. “It was cheesy but it was mine.”

“You still have to tell me the story behind her,” Coulson prodes, gently.

“Oh, boy, I’m going to need a lot more commitment from you before I disclose that.”

“More than living together?”

She nods. 

“Now that just makes me even more curious about it,” he says, turning around and dropping a couple of soft kisses on her neck, his favored area this afternoon.

“There’s your aesthetic, by the way,” Daisy tells him. “Your mom’s lamp.”

He likes the way Daisy says _your mom_. It sounds almost like she knew her. He wishes they could have known each other. They would have gotten along. He feels a pang of sadness that they never got the chance.

“My aesthetic is… Crappy 70s yard sale items?” he asks, amused by the idea. It was a truly ugly lamp, all things considered.

Daisy shrugs. “Yep. Sorry.”

“Ouch.”

She chuckles. “I’m okay with that. We’ll fill the place with crappy tacky second-hand junk.”

The way she says _we_ sounds today even better than usual to Coulson.

He looks around the room.

“You’re right,” he says. “Let’s give away all this stuff and buy everything new.”

Daisy smiles, hiding her face into the crook of Coulson’s neck. He smells of painting, pungent, and, underneath, of the shower gel they both share.

She’s not too sure how she got here; one moment she was living in her van, one moment she was meeting her real family in Afterlife, one moment she was saying goodbye to Lincoln who wanted a normal life, and one moment she is here, resting her elbow on Coulson’s thigh in the sunlight and choosing curtains for their house. Their house.

“What’s wrong?” Coulson asks, because she must have made a face.

“Nothing,” she smiles. “I just thought… I’ve never done this before.”

“Me neither,” he tells her, in a voice that’s half hopeful half with regret, and that makes Daisy feel all gooey-tender for him.

She settles between his legs this time (she prefers it the other way around but hey, she’s not greedy), resting her head on Coulson’s shoulder. They stand like that for a while, just looking at the stupid wall. Both vaguely ridiculous. The room begins to darken around them.

“We should probably get back to headquarters,” Coulson says, eventually, breaking the silence and the spell and sounding genuinely pained about it.

Right, they have a job and all that. Important and dangerous and all consuming.

Daisy decides that can wait for one night, for this momentous occasion. Momentous for her at least, in all humble glory.

She looks back at the metal gauntlets resting on top of the kitchen table, waiting for her.

Not this time.

“Or we could stay here, inaugurate the flat,” she says to Coulson, nudging him, being as unsubtle as she always is (Coulson is not sure if she loves her for it or _despite_ ).

“We have no food.”

“We can order takeout,” Daisy replies.

“There are no sheets on the bed,” he points out.

“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” Daisy protests, disappointed.

He seems to think it over.

“What about clothes? We haven’t brought a change.”

She finally groans at his apathy. “Come on, you can wear the same suit two days in a row.”

He smirks, turning in his seat and wrapping one arm around her again. “That might start some _rumors_ …”

Daisy chuckles.

“Come on, Phil, it’s been a year. The paparazzi know, everyone knows.”

“Okay,” he says.

He’s not sure why he’s being coy - except he sometimes likes to _frustrate_ Daisy - because he can’t think of a better plan than staying here and eating cheap takeout on the floor with Daisy and then making love to her in a bed without sheets.

“Yeah?” she asks, making sure.

“We can stay the night,” he tells her.

They’ll figure out the details later, call the team - they doubt any of them is going to begrudge them taking the night off.

“I think the yellow is a good idea,” he says, looking at the wall.

Daisy’s body hums against him, letting go of vibrations she normally keeps at bay when she’s around other people.

“I’ve never done this before,” she tells him.

“What? Choosing a color?”

“Being happy,” she says, simply.

Coulson nods and pulls her a bit closer, whispering against her temple.

“Yeah, me neither.”


End file.
